Podcast: Economic and financial challenges in South East Europe

With Gent Sejko (Governor, Bank of Albania)
Monday 12 June 2017

Book Launch: Memories of Empire and Entry into International Society

At a seminar on 6 June 2017, Dr. Filip Ejdus, Assistant Professor at the University of Belgrade and Marie Curie Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, presented the volume Memories of Empire and Entry into International Society: Views from the European Periphery (2017, Routledge) which he edited. The event was chaired by Kalypso Nicolaïdis (St Antony’s College); Richard Caplan (Linacre College), Vjosa Musliu (Free University of Brussels) and Jan Zielonka (St Antony’s College) were the discussants.

As Dr Ejdus explained, the voulme builds on critiques of the English School approach to International Relations (and especially its Euro-centrism) raised by Iver Neumann and Jennifer Welsh, by looking at seven Eastern and South-eastern European states, each analysed in a separate chapter by a native scholar. The starting point of the book is that English School, in studying how non-European states enter into the European society of states, has neglected the European periphery, partly because it was taken for granted as being fully European. By bringing the under-studied cases of Belarus, Bulgaria, Greece, Poland, Serbia, Slovakia and Romania into the limelight, the volume applies the critical English School approach to analyse the entry of this liminal space into international society and the role of memories therein.

Majoritarian futures in Europe and beyond

Ivan Krastev, a political scientist and a renowned public intellectual, who is also the Chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, gave the SEESOX Annual Lecture on 24 May 2017. Entitled “Majoritarian futures in Europe and beyond”, the lecture was chaired by SEESOX director Othon Anastasakis.

Krastev’s lecture kicked off with Jose Saramago’s 2005 novel Death with Interruptions, which tells the story of a country where people suddenly stop dying and death loses its central role in human life. Krastev likened this story to the West’s experience with globalization, a dream that turned into a nightmare. Suggesting that what we are witnessing worldwide is a revolt against the progressive post-1989 liberal order - defined by the opening of borders for people, capital, goods and ideas - and which takes the form of democracy’s revolt against liberalism, Krastev went on to dissect Francis Fukuyama’s article “The End of History.” Fukuyama had presented the victory of the West in the Cold War as one delivered by history itself. According to Krastev, Fukuyama’s piece captured the zeitgeist well; but one aspect was missing in his famous article. He talked about the free movement of capital, of goods and of ideas, but not of people, at least to the extent that we are experiencing now. The reason for this was, Krastev claimed, Fukuyama’s belief in the resistance of democracy. Fukuyama had believed that people would not migrate because democracy would create favourable environments in their homelands. But this turned out not to be the case. Today, poor and dysfunctional countries had become places in which it is not worthwhile to live, while Europe had neither the capacity nor the will to open its borders to everybody.

Book Launch: Between Military Rule and Democracy

At a seminar on 11 May 2017, Dr Yaprak Gürsoy, Academic Visitor at SEESOX and Associate Professor at Bilgi University in Istanbul, presented her forthcoming book ‘Between Military Rule and Democracy: Regime Consolidation in Greece, Turkey, and Beyond’ (2017, University of Michigan Press). Chaired by Othon Anastasakis (St Antony’s College, Oxford) Laurence Whitehead (Nuffield College, Oxford) and Stathis Kalyvas (Yale University) were the discussants.

As Gürsoy explained, the book deals with the origins of democratic and authoritarian regimes in countries in which the military is a significant political actor. Treating the military as an actor in its own right, and with a distinct corporate interest, the book looks at the circumstances of military intervention in the democratic procedure through, for example, short-lived coups d’états, the support or establishment of longer term authoritarian regimes, or by accepting the authority of democratically elected civilians. Building on Robert Dahl’s concept of polyarchy (1971), and particularly the distinction between the costs of toleration and the costs of suppression, Gürsoy argues that elite actors such as military officers support democracy, authoritarianism, or short-lived coups depending to a large degree on their perception of threats with respect to their interests. The power of the elites relative to the opposition, determined partly by the coalitions they establish with each other, affects the success of military interventions and the consolidation of regimes. 

Mining language and network data for understanding online political networks: the case of the far right and the far left in Greece

This was Lamprini Rori’s inaugural presentation as AG Leventis Fellow at SEESOX. It focused on the online dynamics of radical and extremist political actors on Greek Twitter, and the interactions between and among them, during the turbulent political period of 2014-2016. Lamprini described the decline in levels of trust in mainstream media over time in Greece, especially since the beginning of the crisis, the drastic fall in readership of newspapers, and the closure of a series of important media outlets (TV and press). A clear shift to social media took place between 2015 and 2016. Greek Twitter offered an important arena of political information, communication and socialization, not only mirroring political change, but to a certain extent producing it.

Lamprini presented her interdisciplinary research work on online political networks, including relevant political phenomena, such as to what extent discussions on social media took place inside echo chambers. She suggested that the rise of new issues during the financial crisis, like opposition to austerity and to the EU, had produced new alignments which cut across/went beyond the historic Left/Right division, without however dissolving it. She further introduced the term “interactive extremism” in order to describe the exchanges between the edges of the political system. She also proposed an innovative method of identifying party advocates online, based on the premise that when individuals retweet political candidates, their action implied a level of endorsement. Through this method of mapping political networks, she examined a series of hypotheses, relating to the cohesion and structure of political networks on Twitter. She explored interactions inside and between political networks on Twitter in the run up to the elections of three different ballots: the parliamentary election of 25 January, the bailout referendum of 5 July, and the snap election of 20 September.

Illiberalism and post-ideology party politics in South East Europe

On March 8 2017, Dr. Adis Merdzanovic and Dr. Othon Anastasakis presented two separate papers and shared the findings of their recent research in a SEESOX seminar, chaired by Nancy Bermeo.

In his presentation, Dr. Merdzanovic, who is a junior research fellow at SEESOX, first provided definitions to the key concepts of the seminar. The first concept he explained was “party politics,” which he argued was linked with the concept of “cleavages.” Merdzanovic agreed with assessments that the four ruptures that Lipset and Rokkan in their seminal piece (1967) stressed, has been reduced to two dimensions in most European countries, as argued by Kriesi et al. (2006).  The two cleavages that seem to matter the most are the economic and cultural, with the latter’s exact content being contested and spreading from materialist versus post-materialist values to the cosmopolitan versus communitarian values. The second and third concepts Merdzanovic explained were “ideology” and “illiberalism”. He argued that illiberalism was not an ideology, but a mode of political rule which negated liberal values through rhetoric and took action against liberal rules and practices, targeting institutions.

Moving on to his case studies and the region of SEE, Merdzanovic argued that in South East Europe (SEE) recent research conducted by Szöcsik and Zuber (2014) demonstrates that economic issues are not salient within the party systems, meaning that the parties do not differ much on this dimension. What matters more is cultural polarization along two dimensions: (1) the libertarian/post-materialist versus traditional and authoritarian, and (2) ethnonationalism, in other words, the majority versus minority nationalisms. These two dimensions, however, are highly correlated, suggesting that any types of concerns get channeled through political culture.

Assessing varieties of populism: From Europe to Asia

On 1 March 2017, Dr. Yaprak Gursoy (St Antony’s College, Oxford) gave a seminar on variants of populism in a comparative perspective at SEESOX with Prof. Michael Freeden (Emeritus, Mansfield College, Oxford) as discussant. In the seminar titled “Assessing varieties of populism: From Europe to Asia,” Gürsoy compared Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), Thailand’s Thais Love Thais Party (TRT) and India’s People’s Party (BJP). The event was part of SEESOX’s Hilary Term seminar series dedicated to the rise of illiberalism in South East Europe and chaired by Karolina Wigura. Gürsoy kicked off by mapping the vast array of definitions currently attributed to populism. There are three approaches to defining populism: Populism as an ideology, populism as a strategy and populism as style.

While Cas Mudde in his 2004 work considers populism as a thin-centered ideology that separates society into two ‘homogenous and antagonistic groups’ as ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite,’ Jan Müller describes the populist world view as “morally pure and fully unified –but … ultimately fictional—people against elites who are deemed corrupt or in some other way morally inferior.” (Müller 2016) As Gürsoy argued populism being an ideology is contested but considering populism as a strategy does not provide an intact definition of the phenomenon either, but it correctly emphasizes the importance of leaders. On the other hand, through this approach, populism can be seen as adaptive to neoliberalism due to its low institutionalization agenda which is also directly linked to the charismatic leader factor who “reaches the followers in a direct, quasi-personal manner that bypasses established intermediary organizations, especially parties…» (Weyland 1999, 381)